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Article:
Breeeding Oscar Fish by: William Berg The Oscars, or Astronotus ocellatus, from Cichlidae family, are fairly easy fish to breed. All you need is pretty much leaving them alone and letting them do their thing if you lucky enough to get a pair. If not, breeding might be very hard. They are a very long-lived fish, probably one of the reasons they are so popular today. Originally from Amazon. Oscar Fish obviously requires a large tank due to their large size. They prefer clean and clear water with a deep sand bottom, and a few large rocks. If you keep plants with you Oscars they will be dug up however there are some people that believe that Oscars like to have plants that they can dig up in the aquarium and this might be true since many large cichlid like to have toys when kept in aquariums not to get bored. And since Oscars are large and very smart cichlids, you can actually teach them tricks, they might want something to do like digging up plant. Be careful, they are enthusiastic eaters and they love to eat smaller fish. Thus, only keep them with other fish that are of the same size. Temperature is important, and should be kept stable somewhere in 79-86°F range. Feeding Oscars is not a problem since they will take every food you give, including flake frozen fish, prawns, pellets, earth worms, crickets, kitchen scrapes'¦and of course live food. The most trying task to do is finding a mating pair. If your Oscar is adult in size, it becomes a really trial-and-error process. However once they form pairs they will stay together for the rest of their life. Probably the most common and effective method of finding pair of Oscars is to buy 6 or 8 young specimens (about 1 inch in length), and allowing them to grow up together. A mating pair can be identified from their mating play, which is a seemingly aggressive behavior towards each other; lip-locking, tail-slapping'¦. If one of the fish is overly aggressive, and it is a one-sided aggression and you should separate them or risk loosing one of them. During their spawning process, they will use their mouths to clean a flat rock, and the female will lay her eggs there. Not all the eggs are laid at once; the female will take breathers, at which time the male moves in and fertilizes the eggs. A female usually lays '1
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